URBAN GREENING

Hello, People!

I'm having a good day today, despite how I still don't have a job.
I want to make this the first of a series on Urban Greening. A subject of immense importance, and enormous potential. The urban environment is one of the most unhealthy to live in, even though we all get used to it. For this post, however, I am posting this video on Environmental Justice. This is an issue facing not only the poor and marginalized in cities everywhere, but also the poor, "developing" countries everywhere in the world.
The people who face the greatest risk and the greatest injustice are poor, lower class, minorities. This occurs in cities, but on an even greater scale among countries. The only reason we enjoy such a clean environment here in Canada is that we raised our environmental standards, but have moved all of our dirty industrial processes overseas to poor countries.
For example, Canadian mining companies in Latin America.
I have huge interest and huge hopes for urban greening projects; they're basically the future. So let's kick this off with Majora Carter - this is her story:

WAR IS SENSELESS

Days and days without internet.

THIS IS A GREAT BOOK!

I apologize for my negligence. But I haven't bothered to go out of my way to get online for a while. Not that there is any lack of avalanches of important happenings to try and get our heads around. The unemployment problem is getting ugly, and it's about time I made the sacrificial call to some call center that will hire me for cheap, but other than that I've been watching copious amounts of news, and reading. And Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is no small chestnut. It is totally in the moment, yet it all happened 37 years ago, and for a 22 year old its unbelievably fascinating. It's light years away from the Obama vs McCain election. This book is definitely inspiring me to set my own bars a whole lot higher.
We'll see how the blog turns as a result. I've been following the Health Care Issue in the U.S. for the last while, and its pretty unfortunate for Obama that the public is scared and outraged because of the murderously efficient Republican Partisan propoganda campaigns. There is some seriously loud opposition to Obama's plan, much of which is being stirred by distortion and lies.
It's especially interesting when reading Hunter Thompson's work, and one compares the two eras of Dirty Politics.

BIODIVERSITY!

At the bottom of this post is a link to a youtube video. The embedding was disabled; this video is part 1 of a documentary by my hero, David Attenborough, about biodiversity, evolution, and Charles Darwin. It's on youtube, in 6 parts, and in HD. SWEET. It's a damn good documentary.
However it doesn't talk at all about the biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity is simply the diversity of species, as well as the diversity and variety within species. According to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), there are estimated to be approximately 14 million species. Of that, 1.75 million have been catalogued by western science. New species continue to pour in. Yet a huge amount of those species are endangered, threatened, at risk, or on the brink of extinction. Humanity has caused 6X, the sixth major extinction event, called "The Holocene Extinction Event", which is ongoing right now. The most threatened group of animals today are the amphibians. Long considered an indicator species due to their permeable skins, they are among the most diverse, ecologically essential, and vulnerable of animal groups.
Biodiversity is incredibly important. The overall biodiversity in an ecosystem is an indicator of its health and its balance. We depend on biodiversity and ecosystems for food, air, water (clean water), shelter, waste disposal and absorption, medicine, and many of our other resources such as wood/paper. These are all generated by natural ecosystems. They provide the most vital natural processes to us, and we are dependent on those processes. Among the most undervalued members of our living planet are insects, invertebrates, molds and fungi, and bacteria and viruses. Yet they are all unfathomably important. Invertebrates of all kinds are among the most valuable. The basis of most life is photosynthesis; thanks to plants and algae. The bottom of the food chain. Insects and invertebrates, on land and in the oceans, are fundamental to the food chain. If they were to be seriously threatened, the ecosystems we depend on would collapse. Of the invertebrates, one that is of extreme importance are: earthworms. There are many different species of worms, but what makes them crucial is that they eat decaying plant material, and turn it into nourishment for other plants. Soil fertility is dependent on biodiversity, worms, insects, fungi, and bacteria. The recycling of the natural world.
However, while the disappearance of species is a natural process (no species will last forever), the pace of extermination has been rapidly increasing over the last few hundred years. But like, from 1600-1900 the pace was about 1 species every 4 years. Now, it's 1-3 species EVERY DAY. In the past 100 years, 50% of the Earth's original forests and 50% of its wetlands have disappeared. Tropical species have been reduced by 40%, tropical rainforests being one of the most diverse, finely balanced, essential, and vulnerable ecosystems of all. In Canada, home to about 71,500 known species, we only have much data on 1600 species, and of that, 529 animal and plant species are at risk. 80% of the species decline is related to habitat destruction and degradation. Our government of course is still pursuing its path of inefficiency, resource mismanagement, overharvesting, depletion, pollution, and habitat destruction.
I am also re-posting a second video, which I've put up a couple of times before, of E.O. Wilson, one of the world's top entymologists and microbiologists, giving a speech and receiving the TED Prize. It's a favourite TED talk of mine, and one that is very pertinent to the issue of biodiversity. Biodiversity decline in agriculture is also a huge problem. For more info on the issue, here's the URL for the CBD:

http://www.cbd.int/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfnttoIrMg

Re-cap: THE TORONTO STRIKE AND WASTE MANAGEMENT

The Toronto Strike is wrapping up, so soon the mounds of garbage putrifying the city will be collected and taken to landfills. Yet it seems people still aren't cluing in on a very important lesson: looking at the amount of waste we generate. Most of it does not biodegrade and is potentially toxic to the environment. Landfills are serious zones of contamination for soil, groundwater, and the nearby ecology. And yet, while we know about waste, pollution, plastics and styrofoams that don't break down, we continue with our consumption and callous wastefulness.
Try imagining for a moment every MacDonald's in the world. If you go to one, you will see unbelievable amounts of plastics and syrofoams and cheap uneaten food filling garbage bag after garbage bag, everyday. Now multiply.
I personally know full well how much waste I generate, and while I've been trying over the last few years to find a lifestyle that wastes nothing but compost and a bit of recycling, I am still ashamed of myself every time I acquiesce to throwing stuff into the garbage, which is still too often.
So I just wanted to re-post this video, which I posted before in March in a tremendous rage of anger. I re-posted this earlier because of a comment on my statement that "the ocean's are FUCKED."
I, for one, encourage everybody to try a little experiment, which I have done more than once: don't throw away anything, for at least a month. Watch how much waste you produce. I guarantee it will surprise you. As you build up your pile of garbage, try to find ways to recycle the stuff by yourself, close to home. I don't know the figure, I need to re-check, but I think that the average amount of material we put in the recycling which actually gets recycled is only 30%. The stuff that doesn't get recycled is predominantly plastic and styrofoam.
Watch this:

NEIL - "Light a Candle"

from 'Fork In The Road'

SUPERCAPITALISM

This is a long lecture, but VERY WORTH WATCHING! I really want to get the book.

Re-cap

I just wanted to re-post this video, which I posted before in March in a tremendous rage of anger. I wanted to re-post this because of a comment on yesterday's post on my statement that "the ocean's are FUCKED." I, for one, encourage everybody to try a little experiment: don't throw away anything, for at least a month. Watch how much waste you produce. I guarantee it will surprise you. As you build up your pile of garbage, try to find ways to recycle the stuff by yourself, close to home. I don't know the figure, I need to re-check, but I think that the average amount of material we put in the recycling which actually gets recycled is only 30%. The stuff that doesn't get recycled is predominantly plastic and styrofoam.
Watch this:

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BOOK

If you want to know why our world today is so fucked up, check out this book. Capitalism in action.

HEALTHCARE

You HAVE to watch this! For all you Americans out there.

So, here's the situation....

To those who read or check Peaceful Seeds, thank you so much for your interest, and I'm truly sorry for the lack of activity over the last while. Life has calmed down now for a little while, giving me some actual time to reflect and write for my blog again.
over the past few months it's been nice to mostly have some fun with my posts, especially since the workload as well as the information intake got so enormously heavy. But now I've been able to rest a bit and can get back to business.
First of all, I'd like to just make a few points.

The Earth's climate is changing. This is old news, but a lot of people actually still don't believe in it. Particularly I want to address the Esoteric Agenda/New World Order conspiracy theorists. While we definitely live in an age of plutocracy and imperialism, Climate Change is not a lie dreamt up by the ruling elite. It is due partly to increased activity from the Sun. The sun, and as a result, the rest of the solar system, is getting hotter. However, because the sun has only been increasing in radiation output by 0.05% per decade, it's not nearly enough to account for the changing climate we see today. Now, of course there's always lots of misinformation, hearsay, and conjecture around these issues, and I myself must technically be included among it. Even so, as an environmental student, the actual science is very clear, as are the obvious trends which the climate is undergoing. I actually first noticed it when I was 12. But the point is, the number of cars in the world today is somewhere between 600 and 700 million. Carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere at an astounding and increasing rate, STILL. So much for the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, as are water vapour and methane. The CO2 being emitted by humanity is causing what is called the "Enhanced Greenhouse Effect", as opposed to the Natural Greenhouse Effect. The Natural Greenhouse Effect is part of the balance we used to have on this planet. The CO2 we used to emit was nowhere near the amount we emit today, and so it was absorbed by forests, grasslands, and oceans. Today, at least 20% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions comes from deforestation. The reforestation that is occurring is nothing compared to the amount of deforestation which is still being done, especially today in this economy. Alot of burning is being done. We're all still getting alot of our energy from coal, something i think should've stopped long ago. I was actually shocked when I was 13 when I learned that Canada was still getting energy from coal plants at all.
This is all indicative of anthropogenic climate change. Most of the people in the world are truly unaware of how fucked the environment is. We've lost half of our forests, half of our wetlands, much of our grasslands, our oceans are FUCKED, industries are still plundering resources and producing tons of pollution, nuclear energy is still putting people's health at risk and generating tons and tons of nuclear waste which we have no idea what to do with, and species are going extinct at a phenomenal rate. The other great extinction events throughout the Earth's history all took millions of years to happen; today's, which is called the Holocene Extinction event, is occurring alarmingly fast.
If you're reading this and you don't believe me, as I know some of you don't, please just go and check. But check exhaustively; don't just believe me, but find out for yourself. But if you don't believe me, then please don't just go and believe someone else's theories either. Check their facts and sources. If you go on Google scholar, you can find actual scientific reports based on real, hard data gathered in the field.
To encourage people to conduct their own research, I will not post my sources until tomorrow. See for yourself what's going on. The problem of course with the internet, is that all of the information is there, but so is all of the misinformation. One has to sift through it, and not be satisfied with any answers until they can be proven. If anyone can come up with some solid data that refutes anything I've said, please let me know so I can see it. Thank you all.

man....

Get up this morning. Have moved into the new place. Basement apartment - needs alot of work. Landlord fixing floor on Monday. Needs new light fixtures, new paint job, serious cleaning, and deodorizing before I really unpack. And goodbye sunshine, hello dark clouds and strong winds. Don't know if I should do some work or not. Still weary. No internet; too much going on in the world; no time...

The Canadian Government continues its neglect for Environmental Responsibility

I still can't figure out why this thing won't let me post links, but here's the URL to the Globe and Mail article:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ottawa-could-waive-thousands-more-environmental-assessments/article1197879/#page

The Harper government has been acting incredibly short-sightedly and ignorantly when it comes to the environment. Ever since he was first elected. Now, while we definitely need economic action and new infrastructure, no environmental assessments means the probability of serious environmental damage. It is a well known fact that infrastructure seriously disrupts wildlife and impacts habitats, but the real issue is this lack of concern in our government and in its policies towards environmental impacts and the fact that our needs and our economy are both dependent on the health of our environment.
In the Globe and Mail's article, they mention that the environment minister was speaking in Alberta. Now, Albertans often seem to have a tremendous pride in their province, and are very attached to their economy and are critical of environmental concerns. Just look at the positive and negative publicity surrounding the Oil Sands. But most people don't realize the current and growing problem of Environmental Refugees. In the Maldives, for example. These little islands in the Pacific are disappearing under the ocean. In the coming years the number of Environmental Refugees is going to swell IMMENSELY. But most Canadians, especially those who are ignorant or dismissive of our country's lack of environmental friendliness, concern, and reponsibility, are not aware that we have citizens in our country who are Envirnmental Refugees in their own land. Particularly due to oil development in Alberta. Alberta farmers are being displaced from their own land due to toxic contaminants. This should be outraging everyone in the country, yet people go on believing that our country has high environmental standards, as it should. We have about 50% of our Boreal Forest left, far too little wetlands left, and it's all still disappearing at an unacceptable rate. And now the Government wants to build sewage treatment plants without environmental assessments.
People just don't seem to realize that this is becoming almost criminally irresponsible, and that we should be conscious of what is going on in our country and actively trying to change things for the better.
Is it really so hard to assess environmental impacts and take some responsible measures to protect the ecosystems we depend on? Because we literally do depend on them.

Moving

This has been a month of being constantly busy. Moving on Tuesday/Wednesday. Have had practically no time to write and blog and stuff. Very tired, but gotta a lot more work to do.

Some Truth

DEAD PREZ AND GRIZZLY BEAR